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This volume brings together a series of editorials, from a communist perspective, analyzing the shifting political situation in the contemporary US from late 2020 to late 2024, and how different classes and political forces responded to and shaped that shifting situation. All but the last of these editorials was published in the journal kites, the predecessor to Going Against the Tide. In putting these editorials into a single volume, we aim to give readers a comprehensive portrait of the shifting ground on which we must chart a path for communist revolution in the US, from the moves and machinations of the bourgeois class that rules society, to the agency and actions of all other classes in society, to the various political programs and mass movements that have arisen over the last decade or so. We also hope this volume gives some insight into the dialectical materialist methods of communist analysis we all must learn to employ, including by seeing how we have adjusted our analysis as we see the contradictions around us unfolding and learn where our previous paradigms were correct, incorrect, or in need of some modifications.

The title of this volume, Unraveling Empire, is deliberately open to different meanings. It could suggest that US empire itself is unraveling. It could be a descriptor of the purpose of its analyses—to unravel the contradictions driving developments in the US empire. Or it could be prescriptive, with the editorials plotting a path for unraveling US empire. All three meanings are possible, but the last of the three is an imperative.

Table of Contents

Preface

Kick ’em while they’re down
kites editorial committee, December 2020

Abolish grifterism
kites editorial committee, October 2021

Between Gilead and OnlyFans: Notes on the oppression of women in 21^st-century capitalism-imperialism
kites editorial committee, March 2022

The psychosis of imperialism
kites editorial committee, July 2022

The 2010s as a decade of revolutionary potential diverted
Organization of Communist Revolutionaries (US), January 2023

The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program and the ongoing tantrums of two reactionary petty-bourgeoisies
Going Against the Tide editorial, November 2024